How to make the most of your digital ad dollars

It seems the Mad Men have been edged out by the “math men,” with online advertising on the verge of eclipsing traditional media. Maximizing return on digital ad spending has never been more crucial as businesses clamour for the attention of the type of person they imagine buys what they sell.

In Canada, online and mobile ad spending increased 15% last year, while television, still the largest ad category by revenue, fell 2%, a recent report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada noted. Digital advertising is rapidly closing the spending gap, with online and mobile amounting to 90% of television’s ad revenue level in 2012.

Tablets and smartphones promise major ad growth potential as the web shifts to mobile, but the cookies advertisers rely on to track consumers on the Internet are not supported by most mobile apps. The future of advertising, the economic backbone of the Internet, hinges on the next generation ad tracker that will bridge desktop and mobile.

Ad-blocking efforts are also becoming more popular and effective, driven by the privacy-minded Do Not Track movement. Companies are left to wonder if their ads are actually being seen.

“Online advertising is definitely getting more complicated,” said Max Teitelbaum, the 22-year-old co-founder of WhatRunsWhere, a Toronto-based startup selling something very rare and valuable in online advertising: confidence.

“We allow people to look up what their competition is doing, where they’re advertising, and the entire A to Z of their online campaign. We create media insight that allows clients to better plan and execute with their ad dollars,” said Mr. Teitelbaum.

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WhatRunsWhere “spiders” the web and a collection of Android mobile apps for display ads, compiling data on their servers. Clients can find any company advertising online, view their ads, see which sites they show up on, which ad network put them there, how long the campaign will last, and view other key performance indicators.

“Duration is an extraordinarily telling metric. If an ad isn’t making money, nobody is going to pay to keep it running,” said Mr. Teitelbaum.

WhatRunsWhere can comb through ads by a specific advertiser, publisher, or keyword, and allows users to monitor specific domains. “Adstrength,” a value assigned to each ad showing how it performed over the three years since WhatRunsWhere started collecting data, allows users to learn from the most effective campaigns on the web.

For online marketers, publishers, and ad agencies, this information is priceless. Businesses can cut down the time they would spend testing and optimizing, and launch stronger campaigns based on proven results from their direct competitors.

“It’s like having a bloodhound that goes out and finds things for us,” said Paul Regan, the director of media innovation and strategy for Scotiabank. “As a marketer, you need as much stimulus as possible. You have to go out and try to find a really good competitor that has won awards and start following them.”

When WhatRunsWhere caught the eye of Mr. Regan, he realized that Mr. Teitelbaum and co-founder Mike Cojanu, 24, had built something everyone was looking for: a simple platform based on daily ad data from the web and mobile ad ecosystems.

While compiling ad metrics certainly isn’t new, WhatRunsWhere’s pricing, which starts at $229 per month, puts a monthly subscription well within the budget of most small businesses.

“It really let us learn [to advertise], in many ways, on other people’s dollar,” said Katherine Hague, founder and CEO of ShopLocket, an online marketplace that sells merchandise from small businesses fresh from crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

“Products from ComScore and Neilson are extremely expensive, and only available to very large companies. You’d normally have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this information. We’ve made it accessible to anyone,” said Mr. Teitelbaum.

Both Mr. Teitelbaum and Mr. Cojanu saw the moneymaking potential of online ads at 15 years old, several years before they met.

Mr. Cojanu, who developed the first version of WhatRunsWhere for personal use, still recalls his first payday. “I woke up in my dorm, late for class. I spent $1,000 on advertising from Facebook and Google, and made nearly $8,000. I realized for the degree I was working towards, that was a good chunk of what you could expect to make in year, and I managed to do it before 11 a.m.”

Online ads have come a long way from the static banner ads of the mid ‘90s. Like other mediums before it, the Internet will take time to efficiently monetize. WhatRunsWhere levels the unstable playing field by offering a big data solution to small business owners.

“In the end, the more efficient it is for advertisers, the better it is for everyone. It’s just a question of allowing the technology to get us there,” said Mr. Cojanu.